seems the best hope available to them for leading free and meaningful lives,
and for allowing others to do so as well’’ (Smith 1997 , 505 – 6 ). American
citizens are bound by duty to love their nation, at least for as long as the
American republic is the ‘‘best hope’’ for the enlightened portion of mankind.
And after that? Perhaps these ideal liberals of Smith’s can begin again, ration-
ally dividing their new public life into the spheres of the saved and the
damned, the monied and the specie, citizens and illegals, rational and indus-
trious, or fancy and covetous, and once again create a republic with an
‘‘exceptional soul’’ worthWghting for. If in the beginning all the world was
America, we should not be surprised toWnd contemporary Americans like
Smith again reaching out to claim yet another new beginning for themselves
and their country.
Of course, Americans like Smith are not the only contemporary seekers of
the ‘‘essential American soul.’’ As Hartz pointed out, the interventionist strain
in American foreign policy has long been premised upon the exportation
of exceptionalism. Seeking to deWne the exceptional role of the United States,
Americans also seek to lead the way for other nations. We have seen this
happen in the Declaration, when Americans fought for colonial independence;
the same is true when Americans fought to have colonies of their own. When
the United States began the war to consolidate their control of the Philippines,
Woodrow Wilson deWned the occupation as a pedagogical duty: ‘‘They [the
Filipinos] are children and we are men in these great matters of government
and justice’’ (Wilson 1902 , 728 – 31 ). In 2003 , President George W. Bush invoked
these lines with approval; the idea that the American occupation of Iraq is
part of a lesson in democratic self-rule is premised upon the ideal of a singular
and exemplary American soul that must be learned from. Indeed, the Bush
national security statement is itself an exercise in American exceptionalism,
asserting that ‘‘only one model of national success’’ survived the twentieth
century, and that the United States is uniquely responsible for exemplifying
and extending that model throughout the world. And in this regard, at least,
Bush’s exemplar has had its eVect. Other people throughout the world
have adopted the quest for an essential American soul. The USA is, again,
variously held to be exceptionally modernist, fundamentalist, Judeo-
Christian, secular, blandly homogenous, and violent. Even the recent atrocities
in American prisons and detention camps overseas return us to exceptionalist
narratives; when one learns that an American interrogator at Abu Ghraib
identiWed himself to his victims as ‘‘the Devil,’’ the dramatic conceit is
american exceptionalism in new contexts 293